


Inspiration To Be A Cop

by sirro134



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 01:52:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7488723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirro134/pseuds/sirro134
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft comes into NSY to ask Greg why he decided to become a cop. Greg decides to make the most of it and asks him out to dinner so he can get his answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inspiration To Be A Cop

“Mr. Holmes! What brings you down in the flesh?” Mycroft Holmes never came in on his own unless he wanted an update on Sherlock (whom he hadn’t seen in a while because he hadn’t had any cases for him that were ‘above a 6’) and usually sent one of his minions to get papers.

“The files regarding your case on Mr. Dunning.”

Greg gave a resigned sigh and leaned back in his chair. “Shouldn’t be surprised I suppose.”

“The indication on his file that he was working for the government should have been your first clue.”

“It should have been.” He said then collected all the papers for that file and handed it to him. Mycroft took the file with thanks then turned to leave but stopped at the door.

“Something else?” Greg asked him.

“More of a trivial matter. Something in regards to you on a more personal matter.”

“I thought you could deduce everything at one glance.”

“Not everything.” Mycroft replied then looked down to examine his umbrella before looking back up at the Detective Inspector. “What inspired you to join the police force?”

Greg was a little surprised at that. Interesting. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Curiosity.” Mycroft huffed.

It was now or never. “I’ll give you my answer, but over dinner.”  It was official; his sleep deprivation was altering his logical side of his brain.

Mycroft was a bit surprised at his bold proposition. If anything, it intrigued him. Not many had the nerve to be so bold.

“Dinner? Seems like a rather substantial request for such a simple answer.”

“The question is; is that information worth a dinner to you?” Greg asked him.

“A car will pick you up from your flat at 7pm this evening. Since you currently do not have any pressing cases, will that be enough time?”

“Should be enough.” Greg replied with a satisfied smile on his face.  
“Good.” Mycroft told him and left Lestrade’s office.

 

Lestrade was fussing over what he should wear to this dinner. It wasn’t like it was a date or anything but that was the frustrating part because now he didn’t know what to wear! He gave himself a millionth check over before seeing the black car waiting for him down at the curb. Right on time, he noticed.

Greg grabbed his keys, wallet and phone before leaving his flat and went down to the car. He relaxed a bit as he got in an there was no Mycroft in the car with him. Well, he wasn’t sure if relax was the right word.

“Mr. Holmes will be meeting you at the restaurant.” The driver informed him.

“Oh, thank you. Can you tell me where we’re going for dinner?”

The driver contemplated a moment.

“If it’s top secret or something like that then no need to get you in trouble for telling me.” Greg told the man, who visibly relaxed a bit.

“You will enjoy your time.” The driver told him.

“That’s good to know.” Greg said then watched London fly by his window as they drove through London.

When the car stopped, Greg noticed that it was in front of a rather upscale restaurant, not unexpected but now Greg wished he had dressed up a bit more for the occasion.

The host lead him to Mycroft’s table immediately and Greg was glad to find the man already there, waiting for him.

“Mr. Holmes.” He nodded in greeting.

“Detective Inspector, how good of you to join me.” Mycroft smiled back in reply.

“Quite the restaurant you picked out here.” He said, looking around. He hoped he’d brought enough cash.

“Do not worry about it robbing your bank account, it will be taken care of.” Mycroft told him as he looked at the menu. “The steak is superb, as well as the smoked salmon.”

“Thanks, I’ll take a look at those.” Greg said and looked at the menu. Greg saw the prices next to some of the options and nearly choked on his water he was sipping. He knew no matter what he did to hide his reaction to the prices on the menu Mycroft would pick up on it anyways.

“You do know when I said dinner it didn’t have to be... this extravagant.” He told the man quietly.

“I am aware of that.” Mycroft said then looked up at him. “It makes you uncomfortable.”

“You know the answers to that already.” Greg said, still looking.

The waiter took their order and Greg decided on the steak after all (with a bit of persuasion of course) while Mycroft decided on the salmon.

“Now that you have your dinner is being prepared, what inspired you to become a cop?”

“You really want to know, don’t you?”

“I would not be asking otherwise.”

“True, you Holmes’s aren’t one for small talk.”

“Then please desist doing so and answer my question.”

“Alright, alright.” He took a sip of his (amazing!) wine. “It was an old American copper show.” He told Mycroft with a sheepish smile. “Would park myself in front of that telly when it was on and wouldn’t take my eyes off it till it was finished. It wasn’t because the good guy caught the bad guy though; it was how he did it.”

“And how was that?”

“See, the show would start by showing us how the person did it. The audience knows what happened but we got to watch how the main man would look for clues and his deductive reasoning with the clues he found. Some of it was a bit farfetched to fit the episode but you always tried to figure out when the cop knew who the murderer was instead of who the murderer was.”

“An interesting change in perspective for a crime production.”

“It was. And it wasn’t your typical copper milling around either. Always gave off the impression of a bumbling idiot so that no one would consider him a threat, see, but underneath that was a humble genius.”

“Humility; a quality that is hard to find these days. So that was what inspired you? An American based cop show?” Mycroft asked in disbelief.

“You mock it now, but if you watched it you would see what I mean.”

“Due to my busy schedule, I would have to decline.”

“Bollucks.”

“Gregory...”

“What? You’re afraid you might like it.”

“I do not watch any television shows.”

“You never- oh come on there’s never been one you liked before?”

“Detective Inspector-“

“You called me Greg earlier so just stick to that.”

“I called you Gregory.”

Fine, you called me Gregory earlier, stick to that. We’re off duty.”

“Oh look, the food has arrived.” Mycroft leaned back in his chair as the server placed down their plates of food and filled their wine glasses before leaving again. Mycroft busied himself with his food so he wouldn’t have to answer but Greg wasn’t fooled by it.

“Oh come on, one show. One when you were a kid or something?”

“One what?”

“Television program that you liked growing up.”

“Oh very well, I was one who enjoyed watching some of Alfred Hitchcock Presents when it was still being aired.”

“Ha! Loved that too! It really had you thinking outside the box, didn’t it?”

“Actually, some of what was in that show made more sense than the reality we live in.” Mycroft said, rather honestly and possibly a fraction more honestly than he had intended.  

Greg considered that for a moment. He knew the Holmes’s were rather unique but he could easily see the two having to learn manually how human interactions worked unlike most who had it naturally installed into them at birth. “Back then, they kept me guessing all the time.” He said. “Helped see things from a different perspective sometimes.” He shrugged.

“Yes.” Mycroft agreed and looked down at his salmon.

“If I may, growing up wasn’t easy for you socially, was it?” Where was this boldness coming from? Greg’s brain certainly was being hijacked.

Mycroft looked back up at the DI, likely contemplating on what way he should answer, Greg thought.

“As you can imagine, Sherlock and I are not exactly what one would call average. Social skills were not something we were not naturally skilled in and had to learn manually, mostly through experimenting with people to understand the mechanics of it. So, no; growing up was a constant minefield we weaved through until we started to see the correlations and patterns in human behaviour. Some facts were viewed as insulting and should be monitored before uttering them, for example. Sherlock never bothered to master that one in particular.”

“No, he didn’t. But it makes sense really. Why keep that bit of information in his mind palace when he could keep something useful that might help him solve a case or something.”

“I am sure he has preached that point multiple times.”

“He has. But you seemed to master it well enough. At least enough to look like it’s natural even though it isn’t.”

“I found that the more ‘normal’ you act, the less attention you draw to yourself.”

“And you didn’t want anyone paying you any attention except the right people at the right time.”

“Precisely.”

There was a comfortable silence between them as they ate and Greg silently congratulated himself on getting through one layer of the supposed Ice Mycroft surrounded himself in. He may not know the man well, be he knew he had a soft beating heart under all that ice, even if he only showed that when it came to caring for his brother.

“Stop that.”

“Hmm?” Greg snapped back to the present.

“Humanizing me.”

“You are human so I can’t fix what isn’t broken.”

“I may have the same biological necessities and components as you do, but I am not like you.”

“You hide behind the persona you have built over the years but you still love and care for your brother.”

“I only worry about him.”

“Because you love him.”

“I fend off the impending doom of a visit from mother, therefore keeping Sherlock alive will keep that from happening.”

“Why is it so hard for you to admit you love him?”

“Caring is not the advantage.”

Greg was about to retaliate but something in the look on Mycroft’s face stopped him. Mycroft cared about Sherlock deeply but in his line of work, he couldn’t afford to have any disadvantages or allow for anything to be hung over his head in order to control him. So by not being very frequent in Sherlock’s life (Sherlock would beg to differ of course) he was protecting Sherlock as well as himself from the possibility of Sherlock being harmed.

“Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s what you need to make it through a case.” How many cases had he been given where a kid had been stolen from their parents and butchered in the night? How many cases did he get where the partner murdered the other because of an affair? Oh yes, there were times where caring was not the advantage, keeping him up at night trying to get the images of mutilated bodies of all ages out of his mind. They haunted him and he wished he could turn off the caring instinct embedded into him but he could not. And neither, it seemed, could Mycroft. He was just better at hiding it than others.

“In your profession, I am sure you find times where caring certainly has not been advantageous to your work. “

“No.” Greg said quickly, thinking of something to change the subject. He didn’t really want to get into anything work related, especially with the case they had going at the moment-

“The Miller case involves a young boy that was butchered and rearranged-“

“Stop.” Greg interrupted him.

“My point is made.”

“You already knew it was made so why did you go and provoke it more?”

“Apologies. I did not mean to upset you.”

“Can- may we speak about something else?” Greg asked.

The servers came to take away their now empty plates.

“Perhaps we should end out evening. I have obviously upset you and I have the information I was searching for.”

“Maybe.” Greg said. He wished the evening would continue on with Mr. Holmes next to him but he couldn’t think of a reason for them to stay together without sounding obvious about it.

“Unless there was something else?” Mycroft asked.

“Well, just seems like a waste of an evening to just eat then retreat home again.” He said.

“Do you wish to do something with the remainder of your evening?”

“Yeah but... not alone.” Whoever hijacked his mouth was going to be very sorry once he was through with them.

“I do not understand.”

“If you do not have any further obligations this evening, would you like to join me for a walk around the pier? Or watch telly? Or something?” He asked.

“You want to spend more time with me even though I distressed you?”

“Lots of people distress me and I still like spending time with them.”

“Oh.”

“If you don’t want to you don’t have to.”

“I would, however there are some work matters that need to be tended to before the morning.”

“Should probably take another look at that case anyways.” He should have known that Mycroft wouldn’t really want to spend time with him. He was just the man who kept Sherlock busy after all.

“That is not true.”

“I shouldn’t look at my case?”

“No, what you were thinking after that. Thinking of Self-degrading thoughts, do not do that. You have much more value than you know.” Mycroft said then took a breath. “I realize my decline to your invitation can be seen as a slight towards you, which it was not meant to be. I do wish to spend some more time with you on a social call instead of business. The opportunity to spend time with someone merely for enjoyment is not a common factor with my line of work.”

“Sure. Whenever the both of us have a free night or lunch or... something.” Greg said, a smile threatening on his face.

“Excellent.” He said then lifted his wine glass. “A toast to the next meeting.”

This time Greg did smile and clinked his glass against Mycroft’s. “To next time.” He agreed.

They both rose to leave and Mycroft settled the bill before both walked out to the side walk.

“My schedule is a rather full and unpredictable one.” Mycroft warned.

“So is mine, if you hadn’t noticed.” Greg grinned.

“We shall keep in touch.”

“We shall.”

“Good evening, Gregory.”

“Good evening, Mr. Holmes.”

“Mycroft.” Mycroft amended

“Mycroft.” Greg nodded then turned to the waiting car.

Mycroft watched the man get into the car without a fuss and watched it go before settling into his own car. This could have many repercussions, especially if Sherlock got wind of it.

But perhaps it would be worth it after all.

 


End file.
